THE WORLD OF SIBLASKA was conceived on a pleasant day in 1988 at Marina Beach Park in Edmonds, Washington.  Our 6-year-old daughters frolicked on the playground while we sat on a bench, lattes in hand, looking out across Puget Sound.  We watched a seaplane flying low along the water like he was avoiding radar.  I even commented as such.  “Can you imagine what this area must have been like during Prohibition?  Here, so close to the border and international waters, all these secluded bays and inlets…We should write a book about Prohibition...”  Then Doug piped in, “But not that Prohibition…A future Prohibition!”  That sparked it. The whole story just spilled out of us as if we were speaking in Tongues.  A brave new world 30 years in the future.  The characters, the storyline, all of it.  What would this world be like?  We speculated that Alaska would secede from the union and annex eastern Siberia.  Hmmm… Siberia and Alaska.  We pointed at each other and said in unison “Siblaska!” 

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So, two theatre guys got together and wrote an alternative history spy thriller.  By early 1990 the manuscript for On the Rocks was done.  Not bad for a couple of easily distracted slackers who had never written anything on this scale.  We had it copyrighted, duplicated and submitted (unsolicited, without an agent) to various publishing houses with the expected results. So, we shelved it.  We patted ourselves on the back for our efforts and went on with our lives. 30 years later Doug suggested we think of reviving On the Rocks from its bookshelf slumber. His idea of changing the story from “The Future 2020” to an “Alternate Reality 2020” was surprisingly easy; the story’s original collapse of modern society meant that technology had slowed significantly.  We didn’t have flying cars, androids or ray guns in the first place so there were actually very few changes required, and we wanted to revive this book in a form as close to the original as possible.